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glimpse of what to expect from a multifoot rise in
sea level. at morning a cyclone, called Aila, was
lurking o shore, and its 70-mile-an-hour winds
sent a storm surge racing silently toward shore,
where the villagers, unsuspecting, were busy
tending their rice elds and repairing their nets.
Shortly after ten o'clock Nasir Uddin, a
40-year-old sherman, noticed that the tidal
river next to the village was rising "much faster
than normal" toward high tide. He looked back
just in time to see a wall of brown water start
pouring over one of the six-foot earthen dikes
that protect the village---its last line of defense
against the sea.
Within seconds water was surging through
his house, sucking away the mud walls and ev-
erything else. His three young daughters jumped
onto the kitchen table, screaming as cold salt
water swirled around their ankles, then up to
their knees. "I was sure we were dead," he told
me months later, standing in shin-deep mud
next to a pond full of stagnant green water the
color of antifreeze. "But Allah had other plans."
As if by a miracle, an empty fishing boat
swept past, and Uddin grabbed it and hoist-
ed his daughters inside. A few minutes later
the boat capsized, but the family managed to
hang on as it was tossed by waves. e water
finally subsided, leaving hundreds of people
dead along the southwest coast and thousands
homeless. Uddin and most of his neighbors
in Munshiganj decided to hunker down and
rebuild, but thousands of others set out to
start a new life in inland cities such as Khulna
and Dhaka.
THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE ARRIVE in Dhaka each
day, eeing river ooding in the north and cy-
clones in the south. Many of them end up living
in the densely populated slum of Korail. And
with hundreds of thousands of such migrants
already, Dhaka is in no shape to take in new
residents. It's already struggling to provide the
most basic services and infrastructure.
Yet precisely because Bangladesh has so
many problems, it's long ser ved as a kind
of laboratory for innovative solutions in the